what has disappointed me the past few years is the sox inability to get draft picks when their guys leave. Magglio, Valentin, S Alomar, Tony G, R Alomar, C Everett, S Sulivan are some of the guys recently denied arbitration. I won't say i wasn't happy to see them go, but I believe we could have offered to valentin and everett and they would have looked elsewhere. I still believe magglio would have turned down arbitration, and because we won a coin flip against florida that year, wouldn't that have given us detroit's #1 pick (#10 overall)?

Kenny Williams' propensity to include many team options in contracts is mainly the cause of this. club options were denied to thomas, eldred, wells, S Alomar #2, C Everett #2, B Davis, and S Schoenweis, which netted us zero draft picks. That is his style, and I think it is still a good one, so please don't blast me for this. It does a good job of avoiding the bad contracts that can cripple teams.

Perhaps to counteract his philosophy of trading prospects for major league talent, KW can trade a MLB ready prospect that is blocked at the big club for a pair of low A prospects with good upside. But the sox have plans with fields and rogowski isn't hyped very much to get a good return.

when thinking about the sox approach to development, it explains why they pick fewer raw talent guys and go for the lower ceiling college players (mostly pitchers). A perfect example of this is the royce ring pick.
i apologize that this post is long and doesnt add any new insight.

We will see how the future stacks for us.

First of all, the most you could cut those contracts was 20%, so it was a tremendous payroll and personnel issue if we ended up retaining those players we didn't want if we were to move forward as an organization.

For a MLB Type A free agent, the signing team gives up its first round selection (if outside the first half of the first round, otherwise, they give up their second round selection) and the team that loses the free agent gets a sandwich selection between the first-and-second rounds. So, you get two draft picks for one player. If a team signs two Type A players, it loses its first two draft picks. Three Type A free agents, first three draft picks.

Type B is similar, except no sandwich pick.

Type C is a sandwich pick between the second and third rounds.

As you can see, we wouldn't have gotten a top draft pick for Magglio. And the risk of cutting a $14.5 million dollar contract (the numbers for Sox players are always bloated as their deals are back-loaded) 20%, we would have had to pay Magglio between $11.5-12.0 million, and I think every Sox fan agrees that money was better allocated amongst El Duque, Dye, Iguchi, Hermanson, AJ, etc.

If the Tigers didn't exist (bidding against themselves for Magglio it seems), then no team would have paid him that much coming off his injury...the Yankees and Red Sox already had RFers. It was too big a risk for KW imo.